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Tuesday, 30 June 2015

Detecting plagiarism with Unplag

Plagiarism has become an increasingly significant issue with the increase of online information and the ease with which it can be copied. It is an issue in the classroom for students and educators, but it’s also an issue for writers, bloggers and journalists.

Of course plagiarism is nothing new. Students and writers have been copying each others work or copying from books for centuries, but perhaps what is different now is the ease with which you can actually detect plagiarism and identify the original sources of the content.

This is where Unplag can help. Unplag is a professional tool for detecting plagiarism. Unplag works in a number of ways.

You can use it to create your own library of content built up of student work and then check to see if they are plagiarising from each other.

You can use it to search billions of webpages to see if students are plagiarising from the internet.

You can run a comparison check between two files to see what similarities there are.

When you check a file against the internet for plagiarism you can also generate a report which includes links to the specific pages where the content originated and clicking through to those pages Unplag highlights the precise piece of text that has been plagiarised.

Unplag also creates a PDF report that you can download or email to someone else. The report contains statistics about the percentages of content that are similar as well as the links to the original sources.

This makes reporting on plagiarism during meetings or tutorials much more effective as you can have the information you need printed up and share a copy with whoever needs to see it.

As a writer or blogger Unplag can be incredibly useful to help you protect your intellectual property. After creating each publication you can upload a copy to Unplag and then run regular checks on your texts to find out if and where your content has been taken. Once again, having a PDF report to use can make dealing with content theft that much more effective.

You can try Unplag for free, though it will only scan through the first 20% of any document you want to check. If plagiarism is something that is a regular problem you need to deal with then you can subscribe for as little as $4.99 a month.

Of course it is possible to run parts of your documents through Google or another search engine to check whether the content is plagiarised, but this isn’t very efficient and can take up a lot of your time, so in the long run, having a service like Unplag can save you both time and money.

I found Unplag really quick to register on and very quick and simple to use. Just click the icon to upload your document, then choose the type of check you want.

Unplag takes around 4 seconds to check a document and then shows you the report on the sidebar. You click through to the sources and check what they are. Unplag also has the ability to separate out references from the main text content, so this is great for checking academic articles.

You can then either click the icon to download the report or you can click on the share icon to email the report to someone else.